I drove over Monarch Pass the first time when I was sixteen, white-knuckling it all the way. I was on a fishing trip with Jerry Donnelly, his little sister, and his Dad, who unexpectedly asked me to drive. I have probably driven over Monarch a couple hundred or more times since, and I always have enjoyed it in the summer. Winter… not so much.
When I was a teenager, my brother and his brother-in-law and I left for deer hunting in Gunnison. The pass was snowpacked and unsanded. Near the top of the pass, coming around a curve, there was a truck jack-knifed. Joe tried to drive around him but started sliding and we came within a few feet of the edge. Scary. Another time I was with friends heading for Blue Mesa in late April. We were pulling a boat. Naturally, on the pass, it began to snow heavily. The SUV began to slip and we drove slower and slower, and finally couldn’t go. The driver went out to turn the hubs to put it in 4-wheel, but was having trouble. I ran downhill to warn other drivers that our unit was stopped in the road. He finally took care of it and we proceeded to the reservoir for 3 days of miserable fishing, but we did catch a lot of fish.
In the life I had before my current one, I had to drive in the mountains frequently for my job. When coming across South Park from Colorado Springs on a bright winter day I would look northwest and see dark clouds, and that would be the snow falling in Leadville. I only had to go to Creede a couple of times, once in April. That was one of the two times I turned back before reaching my destination. When I left Alamosa there were a few flurries. By the time I got to South Fork it was snowing so hard that it quickly covered any tracks from previous traffic. My wipers couldn’t keep the snow off. and I gave it up. That was the hardest I have ever seen it snow, except for once on Donner Pass in March. The other time I turned back was on Highway 94 east, when it was blizzarding.
Once I was headed for Gunnison and Crested Butte. It was snowing at Salida and coming down hard at Poncha Springs. All the cars I saw coming from the west were covered. There was a small parking lot for people to put on chains, and there was a trucker there who had come from the west, taking off his chains. I stopped and asked what it was like on the pass. I don’t know if he had used the line before or if he thought of it on the spot, but it was coarsely descriptive and disgustingly profound, in its way, and I have never forgotten it. He said, “It’s slicker than snot and snowing like a booger.”
I know I was in for it but there wasn’t enough snow on the highway there to put on chains. I was driving a front-wheel drive car and thought possibly I could make it over, so I took off. When I got to Maysville it wasn’t too bad yet. Before I reached the little community of Garfield I was plowing through deep snow and I knew the chains would have to go on. There was a little service station there on the opposite side and I turned left to go into it. The wheels locked and I slid past the station and headed straight for a huge snowbank of previously plowed snow, and I hit it, hard. I’m glad airbags hadn’t been invented. I sheepishly backed up, hoping no one had seen me, and got over to the station and paid the guy way too much to put on the chains. I made it over the top and before long there was no snow on the road and I had to pull over and take them off, which isn’t that easy when they are heavily coated with ice.
It snowed 6 inches in Pueblo two days ago and 5 more last night.
Have I ever mentioned my opinion of winter?
Jerry Miller
February 8, 2011 at 10:02 pm |
Jerry,
I have a lot of Monarch Pass stories but I’ll limit myself. In 1982 I tok some kids on a multi-day bike trip that took us over Monarch. I always tried to keep the kids together but that’s a tough pull on a bike. I remember we were taking eight minutes or more to go from one milepost to the next. Finally with a mile or two to go a kid and I pulled ahead and waited at the top. He bought me a Snickers. Never did a candy bar taste so good.
After what seemed an interminable wait the last girl got to the top pushing her bike. We crammed her iand another girl into the cab of my VW pickup that we used for a sag wagon, along with the non-riding driver.
I got a little crazy and passed a semi. My bike developed a speed wobble but I manged to stay upright.
We eventually got to Blue Mesa where we camped. We at big cans of Dinty Moore stew. One boy told his mom when he got home how good it was. She got some and he thought it was terrible.
Jeff Arnold
February 10, 2011 at 10:16 pm |
I remember that trip over Monarch and wondering what my dad was possibly thinking when he got out and handed the keys to Jerry (just joking). He did a good job, obviously, we’re both still here. I’m a little paranoid about heights and Monarch is never a fun ride for me, especially when heading back from Gunnison and I’m on the canyon side of the pass. And that uncomfortable feeling pales in comparison to the one on the narrow-gauge railroad trip from Durango to Silverton. I’ve never tested my nerve on the Million Dollar Highway, but assume that is even worse.
Thanks for the memories.
February 15, 2011 at 6:07 am |
My scary Monarch-in-a-snowstorm event happened after Thanksgiving break, 1962. My roommate & I were in back seat, 2 guys in the front. Heavy snowfall became whiteout on Monarch. Passenger guy had his door open so he could see where snowplows had cut snow on side of road. Driver was creeping. Passenger said he couldn’t see the snow anymore. Driver rolled to a stop. We waited for snowfall to lift enough so we could see where we were at on the highway. Horrors!! We were less than 3 feet from the edge!!!!!! Driver backed up slowly, continuing slowly while all of us held our breaths and prayed there would be no more whiteouts. We made it back to school in Gunnison. Don’t remember how long it took us, but it was really late when we arrived. I still get a little bit of anxiety attack going over Monarch in the summer time. Don’t ask me to do it in winter!
Jerry Donnelly……I went over the Million Dollar Hwy last summer. I hope that’s the last time I have to go over it. It’s very nerve wracking!!
February 19, 2011 at 5:24 am |
My Grandfather took Mom’s family to live at a mine about twenty miles up the creek above Silverton where he worked driving an ore car for a couple of summers back in the 1930′s. The Million Dollar highway was gravel then. My Dad went a courting and had seven flats hauling a piano over there for my Mom to play for the family gatherings. They sent the families out over Labor Day and then the men came out at the first blizzard, My Grandfather rode on the running board of the truck and guided them by feeling the wall on the upside of the canyon with a stick as they crept along in a whiteout. When I was around eleven my family visited the mine and the old abandoned log cabin. Dad tore our 52 Plymouth’s brake hose on an abandoned mining road–ergo no brakes. He could not get repairs in Silverton so drove over the mountain using the emergency brake and gears to control the car. I was afraid but too young to know how afraid I should have been!
June 18, 2011 at 9:13 am |
In late March of 1961, the first day of our honeymoon, Mike and I were driving high on Monarch when we were stopped along with a chain of vehicles during a terrible blizzard. I remember opening my door and attempting to guide his driving to our stopping point by spotting the roadway edge between the highway and the shoulder — it was very difficult and we couldn’t travel more than a few miles an hour.
I don’t remember being frightened by the dangerous conditions of that storm; I didn’t have enough sense to be frightened by much at that time of my life. I guess that I still don’t have much sense. I’ve had many scary Monarch adventures. My last trip over the pass in June of 2010 challenged me with another whiteout situation. I found a place to pull off the road, wrapped myself in heavy covers and slept for several hours, oblivious to the possibility of having my small car buried by the white blanket falling outside. Of course no one knew where I was and I didn’t have emergency equipment with me just in case . . .
When I awoke I had to tear the top off a small suitcase and use it to dig out around the car so that I could labor to get back on the road. It took about three hours, and another hour or so to chip the ice off windows so that I could drive safely. My new mantra when I take off on one of my adventures is, “I’m getting too old for this stuff!”